Sherlock Holmes is looking for a swarm of wild bees and perhaps something more personally sinister at the start of Beekeeping for Beginners. What, or rather whom, he finds instead is a young person, dressed in good if tattered clothes, whose wits and keen observation are a surprising match for his own.

Charles Todd’s The Murder Stone is an enjoyable gothic mystery with a touch of romance set during the Great War. Francesca Hatton, a nurse on the home front, is called to tend to her dying grandfather at his English estate. What was for her a place of wonderful childhood memories is now all in shadows, not only because of her grandfather’s impending death, but also because the war has taken the lives of her beloved boy cousins.

"'Oh, Damn!' said Lord Peter Wimsey at Piccadilly Circus." Thus begins what may be one of the greatest detective series ever written. If you like mysteries set in England at the time between the World Wars, you need to try the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, by Dorothy Sayers.

The last time we saw our three heroes, Anthony Lockwood, George and Lucy, they had spent a night in the most haunted house in England and conquered a feisty and persistent ghost at the bottom of the Screaming Staircase. However, six months have passed since the incident made them famous, and Lockwood & Co. are not seeing any progress toward their goal of becoming London’s (and the World’s) most successful modern-day ghost agents. To make matters worse, Fittes Agent Quill Kipps and his team of young bullies are consistently on their backs.

Middle-aged Rea Carlisle, daughter of a prominent Northern Ireland politician, has inherited her Uncle Raymond’s unusual house after his suicide. It takes little time to deal with her uncle’s few possessions, and every room (besides one) has been sorted and cleaned. The remaining locked door leads to what seems to have been Uncle Raymond’s upstairs office, and Rea can’t figure out why it’s sealed off. Once she pries open the door, she immediately realizes the answer to that daunting question.

Nursing her aunt during her last illness was not how Victorian socialite Emily Radley expected to spend her holiday season. The forlorn and frozen Irish village is a far cry from London’s fashionable drawing rooms, but in Anne Perry’s A Christmas Grace, that is where she finds herself. Far away from her sleuthing sister Charlotte, it is up to Emma to unravel yuletide secrets.

Looking for a mystery with great characters and a story that will keep you on the edge of your seat? Read The Girl Next Door, by Ruth Rendell.

Six decades after World War II, construction workers uncover a tin box containing two skeletal hands. The ensuing police investigation leads to the reunion of six friends who decades before had lived and played in the neighborhood where the hands were found. Old friends will reunite, a marriage will break up, and a past crime will be solved.